


A War of Our Own

by Siamesa



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blade of Marmora Keith (Voltron), Characters Added As They Appear - Freeform, Getting Together, M/M, Minor Character Death, Outer Space, Pining Keith (Voltron), Rating May Change, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stargazing, eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-10-01 18:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17249366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: Almost a year after the Kerberos Mission vanished, Keith comes home to find an alien in his living room.She tells him that she's his mother.  She tells him that the Earth is doomed.She tells him that Takashi Shirogane may still be alive.





	1. Across the Burning Sands

**Author's Note:**

> So. This is actually the first chapter of a two-part prequel to a sketched out longfic with all the Paladins that I've been planning forever, but, well, Events happened and I wanted to write the Shiro/Keith stuff first.
> 
> (So, yeah, please do not worry! Pretty much all named Voltron characters are fine! Keith simply has no way of knowing this.)
> 
> Title is from A War of Our Own, by Stream of Passion - excellent song. Chapter titles are (paraphrased) from Endless War, on Within Temptation's new album.

The petroglyphs give him no answers.

Keith glares at them.  His head is throbbing, a low level headache mixed with the worst tinnitus he's ever had.  He'd hoped they might look... different, today.  All his dad's old junk is going crazy.  _Keith's_ going crazy.  There was a meteorite fall last night, too far away for him to chase, but now he's wishing that he'd taken his bike and gone.  He'd probably be in California by now if he'd followed it, maybe staring out at the Pacific and wondering if he's stupid or desperate enough to dive in.

He looks out northwest for a long moment, at a crack of sky barely visible above the rocks.  Shakes his head.  Gets back on his bike, and heads for home.

It gives him something to do.  Something that isn't throwing and catching his knife by the blade or writing desperate post-it notes to a man who will never read them.  He's low on food, he thinks.  That means a ride into town.   It probably means figuring out if shoplifting's one of those things you never forget how to do.

Technically Shiro left him - not a fortune.  Enough for a new bike, maybe.  Enough for food for a while.  But that would mean going up to a bank with an ID card and a smile and admitting that Takashi Shirogane is dead.

Keith hops off, banging a shin into one of the hoverpads.   Keith swears.  The metal clangs in protest.

Inside his shack, something moves.

Keith draws his knife and crouches down, adrenaline shooting through him.  He probably ought to be afraid, or worried.  Instead, he realizes with a sharp grin, he's mostly angry.  Angry, and a little bit excited, and very much no longer bored.

Not a robber - surely not.  He supposes there's a few things in the house that could be sold for scrap metal, and maybe his dad's equipment if either he or the thief could find someone who actually knows what it does, but the only real thing of value on the property is a hoverbike that was out with Keith when the intruder arrived.

That means thrillseekers, mostly likely, teenage "explorers" - or, less likely but far more difficult to scare off by pulling a knife, Garrison MPs - or, worst of all, some "well-meaning" Garrison-related guest.  Adam had tried to reach out to him after Kerberos. 

Keith peers in the window.  No movement.  He edges around the house, over to the door, feet plastered to the wall so that the porchboards won't creak.

"Hey!  Get out of my -!"

He stops cold.

There is a seven-foot-tall astronaut in his living room.  There is - Keith watches, frozen, recalculating, as the figure brings one long-fingered hand to its helmeted face - a seven-foot-tall, purple astronaut with pointed ears in his living room.

An alien.

There is an alien in his house.

Keith's grin widens, but he does not lower his knife.  Aliens are real.  Aliens are on Earth.  Someone else might have doubted it.  All Keith can think is how much, much more plausible "alien interference" is than "pilot error."

"Keith," says the alien.  "We don't have much time.  I need to get you out of here."

"Time?"  He takes a step forwards.  He can hear that one thing with the metal rods, the one that looks like a Jacob’s Ladder at a science museum but seems mostly to pick up on sunspots, going haywire in the stuffed closet that passes as his bedroom.  "Time until what?"  He tightens his hand around his knife.  "And you know my name."

"I looked."  The alien's jaw tightens.  "I looked in the state records.  I found what happened to your father, found the Garrison, but you weren't - I don't know why it took me twelve dobashes to think to look here, but they're coming.  We need to leave."

"Who's coming?"

"The Empire.   They've learned the location of the Blue Lion."

The petroglyphs and cave paintings flash through Keith's mind.  Too many questions.  He doesn't have time for them.  "Then you should be - I don't know!  Warning the government.  Warning the Garrison!"  The word still tastes bitter in his mouth. He takes a step forward, then another. "Why is an alien wasting their time sifting through the contents of some crazy fuckup's stupid shack?" 

The alien doesn't flinch away from the knife.  Narrowed eyes hold his, firm and steady. "Because I left you behind once.  I'm not doing it again."

-

She's galra.  Her name is Krolia.  She says she's his mother.  It's not the craziest thing anyone has ever asked him to believe.

He looks at the Earth, smaller and smaller behind him.  _The full fleet will be coming,_ she'd told him.  _Likely Emperor Zarkon himself.  All you can do is live, and fight another day._

She'd helped him rig up a warning message anyway.  They'd worked in silence, as he had tried to digest it, tried to figure out if it was all a dream and he was dying of heatstroke up the back of a canyon somewhere.

But now -

Now he sees space.  Now he knows that he's alive.

He'd wanted this so badly, so long.  Dreamed of his first mission, his second, his third - planned them out and then changed the plans.  He'd pictured himself as Shiro's right hand, the cosmos stretching around them.  Sometimes they'd find aliens, sometimes they'd dodge exploding stars, sometimes Shiro would look at him softly and take his face between his big hands and kiss him until the world spun.  Would look at him the way he looked at Adam.  Better, even, because Keith would never dream of trying to chain him to the ground.

(Some of those memories had spiraled back up when Adam had tried to talk with him after the funeral.  Keith doesn't remember exactly what he said, only that even in the moment he knew it was a cheap shot on someone already down for the count, a twist in the knife through a stab in the back.  A better man - a man like Shiro - would have apologized.  Keith had only run.)

The only planet they pass on the way out is Jupiter, strange and roiling.  Krolia watches him as he sends out the warning message one more time, his throat dry.

This is fear too big to put a name to, fear too big to fully grasp.  Keith pushes it down, watching out the tilted viewscreen as Krolia takes them into Jovan orbit once, slingshotting in the gravity well. He knows alien antigrav and inertial dampeners mean it’s an illusion, but he swears he feels the speed, the engines revving, like a hoverbike off a cliff as they leave the solar system behind.

_I’m free._   It’s a strange, wild thought.  Free of what?  But he’s out here, now, further than any human has ever been, with a rebel fighter straight out of a sci-fi movie who tells him he has alien blood in his veins – and he feels his feet under him for the first time since Iverson pulled him out of class a year ago.

He steps back.  Looks at Krolia.  Her hands have stilled, and he guesses the ship is on autopilot.  One deep breath, clenching his fists.

"We sent a mission to Kerberos," says Keith.  "What happened to it?" 

Krolia starts slightly.

"The moon of one of the larger Kuiper belt objects.   It was manned.  Three people.  They called it pilot error, but I knew it wasn't.  I just didn't know until today what it _was_."

She looks at him.  Really looks, the way his Dad used to, jaw out and eyes that saw everything.  Maybe she really could be his mother.  "I know they acquired humans," she says.  "One of my colleagues updates me when he can -"

"Acquired."  Keith breathes the word.  "Alive?"  It doesn't want to leave his throat.  The answers are terrifying.  The _possibilities_ are terrifying.

"Captive."

They stare each other down for a long moment.  Keith tries to remember how to breathe.

"Someone on that mission meant a lot to you."  There's something raw in her throat.  "Keith, I can't prom-"

"Takashi Shirogane."  It spills out of him in a rush.  "The pilot.  He's my - he's -"  _Everything._

She turns her seat around fully.  A hand reaches out, and he feels himself flinch away.  She might have been his mother once.  He doesn't know her.  She doesn't know him.

"Keith," she says.  It's gentle, the gentlest he's heard her voice in the frantic hour and half he's known her.  "When we get back to the base, I'll see what K- what my contacts can dig up.  I won't lie to you.  He's more likely to be dead than alive."

_He could be alive._

"They put prisoners to different purposes.  Most go to work camps.  It's been - less than a year, right?"  She waits for his nod.  "Depending on the work... Many prisoners can last a year.  A few have lasted decades.  That's your friend's best chance.  But if they put him in the gladiator pits...  I've seen matches.  A human wouldn't survive more than a few fights, at best.  If they've taken him to the medics, or the druids -" she clenches a fist.  "Then he is dead."

Keith shakes his head.  _The medics -_ but he can't think of that.  He can't even think about Shiro and the _human_ medics, the research he'd done online, the prognosis that had sent him to punching walls and trying to reschedule his dreams.  The eulogy.  _Takashi died doing what he loved._ The newscaster.  _His condition, in the end, proved fatal to three -_

No.  Shiro's alive.  Shiro's alive, and Keith's going to find him.

-

_Shiro’s alive._

That thought takes him through six rounds of Blades, through a twisted ankle and a wrenched shoulder and a blow to the head that has him seeing double as he clutches his knife and falls heavily through the trapdoor.

_Shiro’s alive._

But the thing speaking to him isn’t Shiro, and it doesn’t matter.  It asks for his knife.  Krolia asks for his knife.  His father puts a hand on his shoulder and then crumbles away into ash.

“I never should have come back for you,” Krolia says, but she’s fading away as well.

_Shiro’s alive._

_Shiro’s –_

The darkness takes him.

-

He wakes, both hands clutching his knife, to the sight of a tall medic with purple, tufted ears and the news that somehow, through a series of events that have become increasingly hazy, he is now part of the Blade of Marmora.

“Your skull _should_ recover.  Bones are bones.  Never worked on the brain of one of you before, though.”

Keith lets out a low breath.  Bed.  He’s in a bed, in a white room, and someone – presumably this medic – has bandaged up his shoulder and ankle without trying to disarm him.  He likes alien hospitals better than human ones already.

“Shiro is alive.”

“You’ve mentioned.”  The medic turns away.  He also has a tail.  Keith watches the end of it flick back and forth and wonders if they’ve put him on pain meds.

A harsh buzzing sound stops that train of thought.  “Patient’s awake,” says the medic, and then chaos breaks loose.

Five Galra burst through the door more or less simultaneously, followed more sedately by a still-masked figure in the rear.  Krolia reaches his bedside first, and looks at him.

“You did well,” she says.  He tries to mirror her smile.

“My knife –” he starts.  He has a vague memory – mixed with the rest of the vague memories – of it growing to the size of a sword, but it’s returned now to its familiar heft in his hands. 

“Luxite.  You’ll be able to control it with training.”

One of the Galra behind Krolia whoops, and Keith tries to figure out through the remaining haze in his mind if this is a sex joke thing, and if so how to avoid ever having this conversation with Krolia again.

“Ignore these kits,” she says, as another whoop breaks out.

“Your planet makes them strong!”  A lavender Galra leans over Krolia and gestures to his swollen eye.  “Tiny, though.”

“Krolia makes them strong!”  Keith suspects this one is the whooper.  “Six rounds, kit!  This calls for drinks!”

The medic doesn’t even turn. “Patient.  No drinks.” 

“Indeed.”

At that voice, everyone falls silent.  Keith shifts and peers up over the crowd, shoulder straining.

“Kolivan,” says Krolia.

“Krolia.”  Kolivan removes his mask to reveal a scarred, patterned face.  The raucous Blades come to attention, soldiers again.  Keith fights the still-instinctive urge to salute.

“Your commander will be wondering where you are.”  Kolivan’s voice is level.  The remaining Blades begin to edge towards the door.  


“My ‘great aunt’ is ill,” says Krolia.  “And as my commander made clear when he signed my request for leave, having a retired admiral in the family _is_ the only reason my career has flourished in spite of my… limitations.”  What began as cheerful sarcasm turns nearly to a growl.

“Just because he’s a fool doesn’t mean _his_ commanders are.”

“The records exist.  The risk was worth it.”  She looks towards Keith. 

“You have a quintant to return.”

Krolia’s jaw tightens.  “I know.”

Now Kolivan turns his gaze on Keith, and Keith glares back.  “You are a Blade of Marmora.”

“I am.”  His throat feels dry.

“Do you have any idea what that means?”

That much he does.  “Knowledge or death.”  At Kolivan’s shake of the head, he forges onwards.  “Victory or death.  You fight Zarkon.  Zarkon who, right now, is destroying my planet.  Enslaving my – enslaving my people.  You strike from the shadows – good.  I’m good at that.  I’m good at fighting.  I’m better at flying.  I’ll fight for you, I’ll fly for you –“

“Who is Shiro?”

Keith freezes.  “The Galra took him,” he says, finally. 

“Emotional attachments are a weakness.”  Kolivan looks from Krolia to Keith.  “Your mother may have compromised years of undercover work to save your life – years built on decades of sacrifice, on death after death.”

“I understand,” says Keith.  He presses back into the bed, head aching.  He does not loosen his grip on his knife.

“No, you don’t,” says Kolivan.  “But you will learn.”

-

He’s good at lying.

Krolia goes back to her mission, Kolivan watches him from the heights, and Shiro lingers, just out of reach, in his dreams.

But he’s good at lying.  He trains like none of these things matter.  He learns names – Mara, Keshin, Antok – learns faces, voices, what side they lead with when they fight.  His blade is an extension of his arm, and he flies the cargo shuttle they give him like it’s an extension of his soul.

And he hunts for clues.

He charts the locations of labor camps – here, here, here – marking their distances from Earth.  Soon there are records of humans, mass deportations, but Shiro would have come first and he can’t rely on them.

His dreams get worse.

_You abandoned them._

But he’s good at lying to himself, too.  And he presses on.

-

He kills for the first time on his first mission, at the helm of a stolen Galra fighter.  He ought to feel something, he thinks, as the adrenaline wears off, and then he quashes that thought right back down.  He’ll never be a Blade if he starts wondering if the other pilot had a face, a family, someone waiting back home.  He’ll hesitate, and he’ll die, and he’ll never find Shiro.

Krolia’s friends slap him on the back and ply him with drinks, and he swallows foul-tasting alien alcohol until he knows he won’t dream.  The next morning he trains with a hangover, and Antok knocks him into the mat and then looks at him with what Keith _thinks_ is an approving tilt to his head.

But they don’t send him on another mission for months.  When he finally heads out, it’s to shuttle cargo between the main base and an auxiliary watchpost beneath the ice of a planetoid that looks too much like Kerberos for comfort.  The only Blade there is a reptilian hybrid who grabs the first crate of food and then vanishes into the depths without a word.  Keith takes the opportunity to download every file his security clearance will let him access.

He starts reading them on the way back, shuttle on autopilot and his feet propped up against a bulkhead.  There’s news from Earth.  Zarkon hasn’t found the Blue Lion – Keith frowns; this seems like something he should have been _told_ – and they’ve begun a fullscale orbital bombardment directed at breaking up the Earth’s crust rather than its population.  The news about the population is bad enough; labor camps and mass executions.  Something called the Champion killed thirty humans at the last public gladiator games – not fought, as far as Keith can see.  Just _killed._

Krolia’s words come back to him.  Shiro would have fought.  Shiro would have died.

_Shiro is alive._

That’s the thought he needs.  That’s the thought he clings to.

That’s the thought that isn’t: _and five billion other people are dead._

_-_

“This is your first solo mission,” Kolivan tells him, face even grimmer than usual.  “We will not be able to retrieve you, but you have the codes for the shuttle hangar.  If you cannot complete your mission, escape.”  A long breath.  “Fight another day.”

Keith nods.  He already knows what isn’t being said: _if you can’t escape, take your knife and slit your throat._

He doesn’t think they’d normally trust him with undercover work this early.  He doesn’t really think Kolivan trusts him at all, at least to get the job done without tripping over his own feet.  That’s fine.  Hell, that’s _fair,_ in a lot of ways.  He’s with the Blades because he has nowhere else in the universe to go, because maybe, just maybe, he can use what they’ve given him and he can get Shiro back.

But he’s the only choice they have, right now, too, because he’s the only Blade who can pass for human. 

The goal at this particular labor camp is something called the Project.  It’s some kind of experimental laser cannon, it’s heavily radioactive, and humans have the dual advantages of being able to stand exposure to its particular wavelength longer than Galra and also being considered cheap and disposable.

Keith’s job is to blow it up. The Blades have tried to infiltrate via the guards, but most of those are robots; the last agent they’d sent in had been caught somewhere he shouldn’t have been and only barely managed to make his death look like an accident.

Antok supervises his transfer onto the prisoner transport, lingering longer than Keith thinks is really necessary.

“Hangar codes,” he hisses, gruffly.   “ _Remember.”_

Keith nods, and then lets himself be shoved into the cell.

There are about a dozen other prisoners.  He knows – he _knows –_ that none of them will be Shiro, but he scans their faces anyway.  Slumped, dirty, and bruised.  All but two are human.  Only one, a middle aged man with a scabbed, bloody nose, even bothers to meet Keith’s gaze.

They’re the first humans he’s seen since – since his last supply run back at the shack.  He can’t even remember how long ago it was.

He doesn’t say anything.  He doesn’t think he has words.

-

Keith’s first day in the labor camp goes about as well as he could have hoped.  He’s not assigned to the Project; instead he’s on fence repair, stringing what resembles nothing so much as barbed chicken wire across the holes made in the perimeter fence by what he gathers are this planet’s particularly hostile fauna.  He works most of the day beside a completely silent blonde woman and a four-armed alien he’s fairly sure is a Unilu, who’s slightly more talkative, though only about the six-legged reptiles that howl in the night and the number of prisoners he’s seen eaten by them.

“Any idea what they’re building?”

The Unilu laughs, a dry, dusty sound.  “Nope.  I’m one of the lucky ones, see?  Your kind, they get to die.  I get to string up wires.”

Keith grunts.  The twin suns are beginning to set, which means that in addition to being sunburned, soon he’s going to be very cold.

The woman lets out a hiss of breath, and Keith sees blood dripping from her palm. 

“Here,” he says, ripping off the bottom of his ragged tunic.  He’s suddenly struck by a desperate, preposterous need to hear a human voice.

She stares at him for a long moment.  “Danke,” she says, finally, slowly.

The Unilu clicks his tongue.  “Your kind,” he says again.  “They die _fast.”_

-

The prisoners get two meals.  This is supper.  It’s some kind of nutrient stew that tastes even worse than the kind the Blades give him for cargo flights, and it comes in one massive vat that has already started three fist fights.  Keith watches from the corner as an all-out brawl begins and the two Galra guards by the door begin elbowing each other and laughing, and tries to pretend the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach is just the fucking awful stew.

“Hey!”

Keith stares.

A young human woman with short brown hair grabs one of the brawlers, and shouts something in Keith can’t make out at another.

The brawlers, impossibly, begin to still.  And, of course, _that_ is when the guards step in.

The door is free.  The part of Keith’s mind that’s a Blade notes that.  A seven-foot Galra is about to pistol-whip an unarmed human woman, and the rest of Keith, the Keith that has spent years of his life trying to be the man Takashi Shirogane wants him to be, is already sprinting towards them.

He doesn’t reach under the back of his tunic for his knife, but looking back, later, he knows that wasn’t tactical planning.  It was simply that his metal soup bowl was fairly heavy, and already in his hands.

He strikes the guard from behind, and that’s his saving grace.  Neither of them sees him, and neither of them shoots him.  His blow doesn’t do much more than knock the guard slightly off balance, but then he hooks his leg and sends the Galra crashing to the floor.  Someone beside him roars, and then another man is on top of the fallen guard, raining blows down on the back of his neck.

A shot rings out.

Keith dives to the ground, but it wasn’t aimed at him.

Another shot, and then another, and the man on top of the fallen guard collapses backwards, red pooling beneath him.  Keith recognizes, with a jolt of his heart, the bloody-nosed man from the transport ship.

There are a few more bodies on the ground.  None of them are the brown-haired woman.  None of them are Shiro.

_Shiro would have fought,_ he remembers.  _Shiro would have died._   Keith did the first, and it’s only luck that he hasn’t done the second.  So far.

He and a few others are herded out of the room, and he clenches his fists, trying to stay light on his feet.  If they start shooting, he draws his blade.  If they search him, he draws his blade.  Two Galra and a few of the robots – it’s a fight he might be able to win, if he’s willing to use the other prisoners to shield him while he does it.

_If._

If he dies, he’ll never find Shiro.  If he sacrifices everything Shiro ever taught him –

They aren’t searched.  They aren’t shot.  They’re simply flung into a cell, and left.

Keith tries to remember how to breathe.

“Hey.”

It’s the brown-haired woman.  He can’t tell much, in the dim light, but she looks about his age, maybe a little older.  He grunts in response.

“You were at the Garrison,” she says.  “Weren’t you?”

-

Her name is Veronica McClain.  Older than him, younger than Shiro.  He doesn’t think he’s ever talked to her before, but she knows who he is.

“My little brother –“ she says, and then she stops.

Keith can feel the ground shifting under his feet.  The Blades didn’t send him on a rescue mission.  But the Blades _did_ send him on a solo mission.  The closest thing to a commanding officer he’s got right now are his memories of Shiro.

He looks around the cell, ignoring, as best he can, the huddled forms of his fellow prisoners.  And something strikes him.  It feels like the best luck he’s had in months.

This isn’t a cell.  It’s an interrogation room.

And interrogation rooms have locks on both sides.

-

The Project explodes with a satisfying boom.  The shockwave catches his outdated little fighter – the hangar had _not_ been well-stocked, but at least she’d been armed – and he fights to recover his bearings.  As he heads towards orbit, he spots a blip on his tracker, and, soon, the freighter that McClain had gotten their mob of escapees onto, hovering and yet to break atmo.

Keith curses.  He’d given them the coordinates of one of the little rebel gangs the Blades keep track of, desperate and idealistic enough to accept four or five dozen mostly-humans into their ranks, particularly humans who came bearing ships.  The rest of the fighters are stowed in or strapped to the freighter, which _could_ cause problems, but she doesn’t seem to be in distress.

Keith’s communicator screen buzzes, and then buzzes again, on a different frequency.  He opens it before the escapees try any more and end up accidentally calling Zarkon.  “What?”

“Keith.  How will we contact you?”

He grinds his teeth.  “You won’t.”  He shuts down communications and powers up the engine.

He’d seen their stares as he opened doors, as he knifed guards, saw them looking not at his human face but the subtle violet glow of his eyes.  He’s as alien to them, now, as he is to the Blades.  Fine.  Good, even.  He has Shiro as a weight around his neck, he doesn’t need any more.

_Shiro._

Keith reopens the channel.  “Wait,” he says.  “I’m giving you a drop point.”  He pauses, looks at McClain’s brown eyes through the static on the screen.  “I’m giving _you_ a drop point.  Don’t hand it out to everyone.  But.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“Takashi Shirogane,” he says.  “Shiro.  If you – if you find anything – ”

She nods.  There’s something in her eyes like pity.  Keith slams in the coordinates, then shuts down the screen.

-

“You did well.”

Keith boggles.  Kolivan merely slightly lifts his brow, then continues speaking.

“You managed to free the slaves without losing sight of your primary mission.”

“It was a test,” says Keith.  His jaw clenches.

“One you passed.  One thing, however, remains to be seen.  What will you do when there _is_ no third option?”

Kolivan holds his gaze for a long time.  Keith can’t find an answer – or, rather, can’t find a convincing enough lie.  Kolivan’s eyes seem to bore straight through him.

“Dismissed,” says Kolivan, finally.

-

_“Keith?  This is Matt Holt.”_

Five words.  Five words, and his heart stops in his chest.  The shuttle’s already on autopilot, has been since he left the abandoned relay beacon whose coordinates and frequency he’d given to Veronica.  He hadn’t really been expecting a message.  Not a _real_ message.  “We’re settling in well,” or “most of the wounded didn’t make it,” maybe a bit of useless but well-meant intel on Imperial movements.

Not Matt Holt’s voice.  Prerecorded, dobashes old, but _Matt’s voice._   Keith’s hands shake.

_“I’m sorry.”_

And the bottom drops out of his world.

_“-to save me, Keith – ”_ but all Keith can hear is _pilot error, pilot error._ Iverson pulling him out of class.  Shiro’s hand on his shoulder, the last time he’d seen him –

_“-won that fight, I don’t know how –“_

Krolia’s voice, soft but matter-of-fact.  “A human wouldn’t survive more than a few fights, at best.”

It’s been more than a year since they took him.  Shiro is dead.  Shiro is dead because Matt Holt is alive, and suddenly Keith hates him for it, hates all of them, hates himself.

“Shiro is dead,” he whispers.  It’s dust in his throat.  His hand is bleeding, caught in the shards of what had been his communications panel.  It ought to hurt.  But he can’t feel it.

Shiro is dead.

-

He needs to _know._

He trains like a man possessed, takes Antok to the ground once and Keshin half a dozen times.  He drinks with Mara until his head spins.  He wonders what would happen if he walked up to Kolivan and asked for a suicide mission.

But he needs to _know._

Gladiator matches are even easier to get information on than work camps.  The Blades don’t watch them, of course, but that makes them more or less unique in the Empire.  Somewhere, buried in match footage and statistic sheets and fucking alien talk shows, is the death of the best man Keith has ever known.

He needs to know.  He needs to see.  He needs to silence the little voice in his head that’s still clinging to hope in the face of reality.  Watch with his eyes open.  Build a memorial.  Have something, something, to set against the nightmares in his head.

Shiro is dead.  Shiro died galaxies from home to the cheers of a drunken alien crowd.

He needs to know.

And then he needs to kill them all, or die trying.

-

_Vardox12: all im saying is the last one would of made it a fucking show_

_Kasarrrrr: yeah, right before he tripped on his own stupid horns_

_2Zolia: you saw the last fight, right??  Climbed up its back and slit its throat from behind!!!!_

_2Zolia: he can kill prisoenrs however he wants to.  Can’t blame him for being bored_

_Vardox12: then make ur own entertainment!_

_Vardox12: don’t just kill them in one blow and fall over_

_1239879234: fall over, huh? sheep_

_1239879234: im telling you it’s the druids_

**_1239879234_ ** _has been **BANNED**_

Keith shuts down the screen, grinding his teeth.  Still nothing.  The Champion has apparently become a reliable method of executing human prisoners – and usually _only_ human prisoners – but whatever “fall” had happened in the last bout had apparently caused Galra censors to scrub all the footage they could find.  As Keith is trying not to use more sensitive Blade methods (such as borrowing Keshin’s passcode) until he’s certain he’s on the right track, that also means they’ve scrubbed all the footage _Keith_ can find.

He’s seen a few of the executions.  Unpleasant.  No Shiro.  More of the fights: the same.  Last night he dreamt he was in the arena, Shiro looming over him, close enough to touch, a red line gaping its way open on his throat.  They’d fallen through the floor of the arena, locked together, and then Keith had woken up.

He hasn’t eaten yet.  He hasn’t actually left his quarters.  He’ll drag himself out to train later.  Kolivan had nodded at him a couple of days ago; he can’t be falling apart too much.

The screen flickers to life for a moment, and beeps at him.

Keith narrows his eyes.  A message.  Blade message.  It could be his next mission; it could be Keshin getting concerned and trying to coax him out to eat again.  He hits the button anyway. 

_Cousin Yorak,_ it begins.  _Please inform Great Aunt Erinya that…_

His eyes narrow further.

The message is from Krolia; that much is obvious even before he reaches her name at the bottom.  It’s a recommendation to “Yorak” of a doctor for his aunt.  He scans it over again.  _I was pleased to hear her situation remained stable._ That could mean something.  _I wish I could do more._ His heart thuds a beat at that.  At least she’d had a _reason_ to leave him.  She’d had a galaxy burning where his dad had had that house. 

The wound is still there.  But it’s an old wound.  If he leaves it alone, it won’t fester.

The doctor has a contact number.

Keith doesn’t call it; it has one too many digits, to start with.  But she’s given him a number.  She’s given him a code.

She’s given him something to do that isn’t trawling through alien message boards looking for Shiro’s corpse.

Maybe she is his mom, after all.

-

He pulls the message’s source encoding, and runs through it, number by number.  He finds one repeating segment, but putting it into Roman letters yields “U-L-A-Z,” which _could_ be a Galran name but equally likely could be a dead end.

A human won two gladiator matches a phoebe ago.  His hand hovers over the video button for an unforgivable, tortured second, but the second he starts it he can see that she’s not Shiro.  He watches her lose her third match, muting the sounds of the crowd when he can’t take them any longer.  Her opponent’s barbed tail catches her across the throat before a blade spikes through her belly.

She doesn’t have a name.  The only human out there to hold her memory is Keith, and even he fails her, because that night in his dreams she turns to Shiro over and over again.

“Get some sleep,” Antok tells him, sharply, when he trips over his own feet in the training room.  “You’re useless right now.”

Keith lies on the mat, and thinks about taking his advice.  A hand on his back makes him jump, scrambling to get his legs under him, but Keshin only takes his arm and lowers him gently back to the ground.

“He’s right, you know.”

Keith glares at him.  “I’m fine.”

Keshin sighs.  He has a long, feline face, and it’s a dramatic motion.  “Kit.  What happened?”

He says nothing.  His throat closes up, his fists clench, and he realizes, to his horror, that there are tears prickling at his eyes.  _Shiro’s dead.  Shiro’s dead.  Shiro’s dead._

“He’s dead.”  It’s a dull, flat voice, and he doesn’t quite recognize it as his own.  “Shiro’s dead.”

Most of the time, most of the Blades are like Keith.  They don’t _touch_ people.  It’s only long nights after long missions when he’ll see groups of them piled together like kittens.  The little group he still thinks of as _Krolia’s friends,_ the ones who seem to think it’s their job to look after him, will clump together when they’re drunk, and Mara, a primate-hybrid like Keith, will occasionally act like she’s picking bugs from behind people’s ears.

Keshin rubs Keith’s upper arm, awkwardly. 

“Shiro’s dead,” Keith repeats.  It should mean something, saying it out loud.  It should quiet that awful, hopeful thread of a voice.

_Should, should, should._

_-_

They send him on a milk run.  Keith takes the time to filter through more of the coded message.  If he spins it out into Roman letters, and cyphers with every other number, he can make “Y-o-r-a-k” turn to “K-e-i-t-h.”  He pulls up the source code again and lets the computer try to crunch through it with the same set.

A loud crunching from the cargo hold below him announces that he’s been paying more attention to the flashing numbers than to the settings on his tractor beam.  With a grumble, Keith checks to make sure the airlock is sealed, then lowers himself through the hatch.

The bulkhead is scratched; his target is more-or-less unharmed, though shrouded in the ruins of what, centuries ago, had been solar panels and are now a knife-edged mess.  The relay beacon squats in the center, and he stares at it a minute too long.

_Keith?  This is Matt Holt._

No.  No time for that now.  He downloads the messages and jettisons the thing into space.

He reads through the ones he can access more out of habit than curiosity.  _Fleet admiral.  Dispatch 9…_ and then he stops dead.

He knows that string of numbers.  They’re the numbers Krolia gave him.

_Ulaz._

_-_

The reports are in a standard Blade code; they uncrunch easily and quickly, words spilling across the screen as Keith’s heart stands still.

Ulaz is a medical officer in the heart of the fleet, liaising with the druids, developing modifications and augmentations for soldiers and “projects” both.  This is a record of his work with the Champion, and none of it looks pleasant.  But that isn’t why Keith is shaking.  That isn’t why the sounds of the ship around him have gone silent, reduced to the sound of that small, hopeful voice, louder than ever, keening in agony.

The Champion is human.

He knows.  He thinks he knows before he opens the first video file.

A figure on a table.  Face hidden.  Broad, bare chest marked with still-bleeding scars.  “No!”

“Put him under again.”  Another voice.  It could be Ulaz.  It could be _Iverson,_ for all Keith knows or cares.

_Shiro._

Shiro in agony, his face still hidden but his spine bowing, and Keith would have known him even if he’d never spoken.  His eyes are glued to the screen, his hands tensed and shaking, his breath a hiss between teeth that suddenly seem too sharp.

This is the first video.  There are seventeen.

He skips to the last, frantic, desperate.  _Shiro._

The footage is distant, fuzzy.  _A hidden camera,_ notes the part of him that’s still a Blade.  The rest of him is focused on the largest figure in the arena below.  The shape of his shoulders – he knows it’s Shiro, but the posture is all wrong, standing but slumped, his head down.  Like a puppet with his strings cut.

Like the best man Keith’s ever known, the brightest thing in the universe, thrown into an arena and forced to kill for sport.

There’s something wrong with one of his arms – a wound? – but at this distance Keith can’t make it out.

There are other figures, too, slumped, huddled together.  They don’t look like gladiators, he thinks, and then realizes why.  This is the fight he spent weeks trying to find.  The _execution._

Shiro jerks into action.  The crowd roars and the camera shakes, and Keith snarls, digging his fingernails into his palms, his breath coming in harsh pants.  This is an abomination, a perversion of everything that Shiro is, everything that Shiro means.

One blurry prisoner falls.  A neck snap.  Another.  They’re trying to fight, but they haven’t even been given weapons.  After the third kill Shiro stills for a moment, and then twists, flinches, raising his wounded arm.

Not wounded.  Keith can see the glint of metal.  A prosthetic?

_A weapon._

Shiro’s hand – the place where Shiro’s hand should be – glows purple.  He slits a throat, and then another, lowering the bodies to the ground now, not letting them fall.  One prisoner remains, charging at him, and Keith can feel his mouth opening to shout a warning.

Shiro whirls, slices.  Again, he lowers the body, but this time, he goes to the ground with it.  He hunches over, a dark smear in the blurred camera feed, but Keith knows him, Keith can see him, arms around his knees, head down.

“I’m coming for you,” Keith whispers, low and rough.  He rests his fingers against the screen, against Shiro’s back.  There is blood trickling down his hands from where his nails have bitten into the skin, the pain just sharp enough to ground him.  “I’ll get you out of there, Shiro.  I promise.”

_Shiro is alive._

Nothing else matters.

_-_

_I’m sorry.  Be safe,_ says the fourth paragraph of Krolia’s message, decoded.

“We must seize this opportunity,” says Antok, tall, chest puffed out, right in Kolivan’s face.

“We will.”  Kolivan narrows his eyes, and Antok shrinks.

“Something’s changed in you,” says Keshin, when they spar.

Keith only nods, and glowers.

Shiro and the Holts were captured by Sendak, a high-ranking officer with pretensions to being one of the Emperor’s right hands.  Keith reads through file after file, studies the images until he could pick Sendak out of a crowd.  Not that it would be difficult.  Large even for a Galra, and with an arm just enough like Shiro’s prosthetic to make him grind his teeth.

He wonders if Ulaz had put it on him.  Wonders if it has an off-switch hidden somewhere, a remote control – but that seems like a lot for a lone agent to risk.

Keith drifts off to images of his blade through Sendak’s throat, trying for better dreams.  He’s read that some people can do it.  Instead he dreams of Shiro.

Shiro’s hand on his chest, aglow with purple light.  Shiro’s lips on his own, their breaths mingling amid too-sharp teeth.  They’re together on the cliffside where they used to sit, now, Shiro warm against his side, but his face shadowed and hidden.  The cliff shakes, and the earth shakes, and Keith can see them now as though they’d always been there, the lights and beams of a thousand Galra ships, the screams and cracks as Earth dies around them.

He reaches for Shiro’s hand, and then he wakes.

Alarms blare, the bass tones shaking the room around him.  Keith grinds his teeth and slides into his Blade uniform.  He knows these sounds well enough – they’re not being attacked.  They simply need all hands on deck, and they need them now.

-

“This,” says Kolivan, “is the Blue Lion.”

Keith watches the footage, eyes narrowed.  _Earth._ Earth quite early on in the invasion, if the state of the atmosphere is any judge.  No miles-high clouds of dust, no cracking continents, not even much space debris.  And then he watches, head moving to the side in unison with two dozen other Blades, as a beam of light races up towards orbit.  He can’t make out much lion-shaped about it at this distance, but he _can_ make out the shape of an Imperial cruiser exploding.

Chaos breaks out in the orbital fleet.  The Blades remain silent, watching; Keith wonders how many of them are like him, feeling the corners of his mouth tilt up in a sharp, bitter grin as two more cruisers collide, as the Lion, growing clearer, slams into the engine mounting on a dreadnaught and sends half their thrusters careening off towards Mars. 

It flashes by them for an instant, and then its gone.  “Rewind and freeze,” says Kolivan.  Keith takes the moment to try to remember how to breathe.  Around him are the kind of low, excited murmurs that even Kolivan’s presence can’t still.

Keith looks over the frozen image.  It’s… a blue lion, alright.  Something between a ship and a robot, with a face, even in profile, that looks far too knowing to just be decoration for the pilot’s viewscreen.  And it looks… he doesn’t know how to word it, even silently in his head, let alone in a way he’d air to Kolivan.  But it looks wounded.

It looks _hurt._

“Now,” says Kolivan.  “Watch the way it flies.”

In slow-motion, he thinks the rest of the Blades can see it, too.

“Damaged,” says Antok.

Kolivan nods.  “It has not been sighted since.  We must search for the Blue Lion, because Zarkon will not let up his own search.  But we are looking for a single ship, dead somewhere in space.  We are, therefore, stepping up efforts elsewhere – as is Zarkon.”  He taps a button.  “The Red Lion.”

Keith stares.  He can recognize, around the lion and its protective barrier, the telltale colors and wall structure of an Imperial Navy vessel.  What he _hears_ , somewhere distant, is the song that haunted his dreams in Arizona.

The image of the lion jerks away, and Keith flinches. 

“Zarkon is escalating efforts to find a pilot.”

Keith digs his fingers into the still-healing scabs on his palms, and steadies himself, readjusting his posture back to something Iverson-approved instead of a child gawking at the screen.  There are five pictures – naval ID photos, most likely, but like most Garrison IDs, they’ve turned out looking more like mugshots.  One on the left was even caught mid-blink.

The one on the far right is Sendak.

“Keshin, Regris, Tikara, Zoran.  Remain for further briefing.  Antok, you know your duty.”

Antok nods.  “Victory or death.  I’ll need to take the new shuttle to the rendez-vous.  Mara, with me.”

Mara stands and nods, asking no further questions.  She’s an engineer; either the new shuttle is troublesome or they’re rigging it for a “accidental” explosion. 

He stares at Sendak’s image on the screen as the Blades around him rise to leave the room.  _You sold Shiro to the gladiator pits.  To the druids._

He’s made it through file fourteen.  He wants Shiro.  And then he wants the Empire to burn.

Someone grabs his arm, and Keith realizes if he stays any longer he’ll be eavesdropping in plain sight on a top secret mission briefing.  Keshin, at the head of the room, gives him a strange look, and Keith tears his eyes away from Sendak, following the last of the Blades out of the room.

-

File fifteen is the specs for Shiro’s third prosthetic arm so far.  _Higher fit; removed scarring and necrotic tissue._

_…removed scarring and necrotic…_

He reads the sentence over and over, as if that will help.  It’s not even the worst of it.  The video this time claims simply to be a 3-D rendering, but all the last ones have featured surgery.  Keith thinks he knows which of the doctors is Ulaz; he’s the one who actually waits for the anesthetics to kick in.

At least, he _hopes_ that’s Ulaz.  If it’s not, then there’s one more name on his kill list.

_Improvements in quintessence drain –_

“Kit.”

Keith whirls in alarm.

Keshin has his hands up disarmingly.  “Still on edge, I take it?”

“I…”  That’s the problem with Keshin.  He thinks that because he’s Krolia’s friend he’s _Keith’s._

“I requested you as my second.”

Keith cocks his head.  “What?…Why?”

Keshin quirks his mouth.  “They’re sending me to assassinate Sendak.  You’re good with a blade, you’re small enough fit through passages full-bloods can’t, and, well.  It’s Sendak.”

Keith’s heart stops, briefly.  He tries for a nonchalant, “Oh?,” but whatever noise he actually makes causes two Blades eating on the other side of the room to look up and stare.

“Shiro was part of the Earth mission he captured, right?”  At Keith’s look, he shakes his head.  “You’re not the only one Krolia writes to.  Kit, you used to have drive.  Then you had none.  Now… Now I think you do, but maybe not the kind that Kolivan likes.”

_Shiro’s alive.  Shiro’s alive._ But he can’t say it.

“Kit- Keith. I don’t want to pry.  But I’ve been where you are.”  His voice trails off, before rallying again.  “You want revenge.  Kolivan thinks the best cure for wanting revenge is self-discipline.  Now, I would die for Kolivan.  He’s a great man.  But in my book?  The best cure for _wanting_ revenge is _getting_ it.”

-

_Don’t do anything stupid._

Blunt and to the point.  It’s the last line of Krolia’s letter.  Keith is reminded of another voice as he gears up.

_Patience yields focus._

His hands are shaking as they board the ship.  He isn’t sure if what he’s doing is stupid or impatient – isn’t sure if that matters to him.  Because this is everything he wants handed to him on a silver platter, and he’s clinging, with both hands, tightly, in case it’s jerked away.

Half the Galra fleet will be parked in and around this particular solar system.  Zarkon explicitly _won’t_ be, which has a few of the Blades, Kolivan included, wary of a trap.  Keith doesn’t care.

There are gladiator games scheduled.  There’s a ship, in orbit around the fifth planet, that he’s eighty percent sure Ulaz is on.  There are reports, from a scout who’s now gone silent, that druids are crowding around the second planet, the life bearing one, like bees around a hive.

Keshin nudges him in the side.  “Stick close with me.”

Keith nods, dry-mouthed.  _Shiro._ He needs to say something.  Keshin had stuck his neck out for him.  Keshin might even understand.

But Keshin might also turn the ship around, and the thought of that is a bike crash, a house fire, an orbital bombardment.  Keith might never be this close again – and every second he wastes is a second Shiro spends in hell.

“Don’t give me that look,” says Keshin.  “I know you’re capable.  But if you get yourself killed, Krolia _will_ disembowel me.”

Keith runs his fingers over the insignia on his blade.  Thinks of Krolia.  Wishes, suddenly, that he’d sent her some kind of reply.  Anything at all.

“I’m not here to get myself killed,” says Keith, and pulls his mask up over his face.

-

It all goes to hell so fucking _quickly._

“C’mon, c’mon – ”

Keshin is dead weight in his arms.  The guards had been on them the second they’d docked, stealth systems be damned.  He drags Keshin into what looks to be a supply closet, knowing even as he bolts the door that it’s useless.  Blade armor is decent, but that had been a direct shot to the head.

He squeezes his eyes tightly shut for a moment.  Blood and worse drip down from his shoulders as he lowers Keshin to the ground, as he peels stiffening fingers away from the handle of his blade.

Telling him about Shiro wouldn’t have changed anything.  It couldn’t have.  But guilt sits like a lead weight in Keith’s chest all the same.  _Your fault._

The harsh, shrill sounds of an alarm pierce through his skull.  For a moment he feels too brittle to move.

_Shiro is alive._

He hangs Keshin’s blade on his belt, keeps his own in his hand.  Rigs one of their small explosives to the corpse – just a corpse now, he tries to remind himself.

_Shiro is alive._

Now that he knows what supply closets look like, he drags a guard into one of them, blade at his throat.

“Where are the prisoners?” he hisses.  “Where’s Sendak?”

He gets the first and not the second.  Blood drips down his arms, and he wants to vomit, wants to run.

He can’t.  He won’t.

_Shiro is alive._

_Shiro is alive._

But there are no prisoners, just empty cells and a single carapaced corpse.  He flings open cell after cell, feet heavy, no longer caring if he makes noise.

“Where’s the shuttle bay?”

The guard burbles at him, and then gives him a sharp toothed smile.  Keith follows his eyes.

The guard brought friends.

_Shiro is alive._

Keith tears through the ship, losing the first five guards by crawling through a pitch-black airduct and then meeting seven more on the other side.  He tries to remember the layout, but it’s all in Keshin’s voice, and there’s a thin line between that and the sound Keshin made when he was hit.

Downwards.  He slides down a ladder, into a maintenance tube.  Down and aft.

_Shiro is alive._

Keith’s hip is burning, his arm bleeding.  There’s a ringing in his ears, and he can feel the skin around his left eye beginning to bruise and swell.  He stumbles through another door.

The light is strange.  Too blue, too bright.  He squints, the lenses in his mask adjusting, and feels the bitter quirk of his lips.

He’s found the Red Lion.

It’s beautiful.  Keith takes in a ragged breath, strange voices whispering in his ears.  He raises a hand to the barrier.

It’s firm and cold beneath his gloves.  Different, in a way his tired brain can’t quite analyze, from Galra shielding.

“In here!”

Keith braces himself against the barrier, blade ready.  _Shiro is alive,_ he thinks, once more.  _Shiro.  Shiro, I’m so, so sorry._

He blocks the first shot, but a second grazes along his calf, the force of it still enough to knock him back.

_Shiro –_

Back, and through.

-

The Lion roars.

Keith, in the cockpit, watches as the guards give way, and then the bulkhead behind them.  Space.  Empty space.

His hands come to the controls of their own volition, as though this is something he’s always known.  The Lion leaps.

He’s flown fighters, shuttles, miserable little cargo craft.  He’s never flown anything like this.  He speeds past a wing of Galra fighters, then makes an effortless one-eighty to barrel back past them, the Lion’s claws extended.  And all around him the hum, like the songs in the desert, like a sunrise in his mind.

_Shiro is alive,_ he tells it, and then, with helpless laughter, _I’m alive, too._

A knot of ships and a little station orbit the fifth planet.  That’s where Ulaz is, and that’s where Shiro is too.  And if not – well.  If not, he’ll take this fleet apart, one by one.

“You have – a gun.  In your tail?”

The sunrise rumbles a bit.

Keith locks on to another wave of fighters.

He scans the ships.  Most of them are undocking, or trying to.  Two destroyers slam into one another, barely unhooked from the station.  Keith grits his teeth.

Ulaz’s ship.  He has the class.  He has three of the ID numbers.

He has it in visual range.

The Lion charges.

-

Keith climbs down out of the Red Lion’s jaws.  It’s lodged into the main bulkhead of what _should_ be the prison block, a supposition confirmed when the first helmeted guard tries to shoot at him.  Keith disarms him, blade to his throat.  There’s no guilt, now.  He’s too close to Shiro for anything else to matter.

“Where’s the Champion?”

“Far – far end.  I think.  I –”

Keith slits his throat.

_The best cure for revenge,_ Keshin had said.  Keith isn’t sure.  He could kill every face in that cheering crowd, and he’s not sure it would stem this dark thing that’s risen up inside him.

He opens the first cell.  A few aliens goggle at him.  Most of them look elderly; none of them are over three feet tall.

“Where’s the Champion?”

The foremost member of the group shakes his head, feathers flopping.  “I don’t know anything, please – we were just brought here!”

Keith takes a long breath.  “There’s a… lion.  That way.  I think it has a cargo bay beneath the cockpit – oh.  The barrier’s probably up.  Look.  Just… wait there, and I’ll get you someplace safe, okay?”

Two in the back whisper to each other, but the group slowly makes its way out of the cell.

The next two aren’t much better – three more prisoners, none of them gladiators, all somewhat skeptical of his promise to whisk them away to safety in a robot lion. 

“The bad men.  The… fighters.  They’re back that way,” whispers the last of them, squeezing his hand between three of her tentacles. 

Keith nods.  He can hear alarms starting to blare.

The next three cells are empty, but turning a corner brings him somewhere much more promising.  He kicks open the next cell door to reveal three enormous, craggy figures individually chained to the walls.

“Where’s the Champion?”

“Behind you!”

Keith whirls to see an electric prod inches from his shoulder.  He kicks out, tripping the guard holding it, then snaps it in half.  “Where’s the Champion?” he repeats.

“That way.”  The largest figure lifts a rocky hand.  “More guards’ll come.”

“Let us out,” suggests the middle gladiator, slightly slimmer and much hairier. 

Keith grins.

He dodges and weaves through what quickly becomes an all out prison riot, his three new allies taking up position on his flanks.

“That way,” repeats the largest, as they come to a fork.

“Bad place, yes,” hisses his third, previously silent companion.  “Druidssss.”

“None there now.”  A heavy hand cuffs Keith’s shoulder.

The hairy one shoves it off to rest his own paw against Keith’s back.  Keith stiffens.

“Galra,” he growls.  “ _Die –_ “

Keith buries his knife in the gladiator’s belly.  Listens to his body fall.  He thinks the rocky one is still behind him, but the hissing voice is long gone, back into the fray. 

The noises behind him, though, seem strange and distant, voices in a dream.  There’s a heavy black door in front of him.  He raises a hand to the keypad.

Something boils up, hot in his throat.  _I can’t survive it, if it’s not him.  I can’t, I can’t, I –_

_You must,_ says a voice, the crackling of a distant fire.  _You will._

But an unforgivable second ticks away, then another, before he slams his hand down.

The door slides open.

-

A huddled figure is curled against the far wall.  Keith can see the glint of metal, see messy dark hair speckled with white, the shape of a broad, scarred back.

“Shiro,” he whispers.

The figure flinches.

“Shiro!”

Keith flings himself into the cell.  Hands come up hard against his arms, nearly slamming him to the ground – and then, softer, up to his face.

“Keith?”  Shiro’s voice is a ragged whisper.  “ _Keith?”_

Shiro’s hands fall away from his face, down to his shoulders, as though he’s not quite certain what to do.  Keith leans into him, and the dam breaks.  They cling to each other, Keith’s arms around Shiro’s ribs, his face buried in his chest.

“You’re alive,” he whispers.  “You’re alive.”


	2. The Ghost That You're Seeing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may notice the chapter count's gone up - I couldn't fit everything into this one, but I found a decent chapter-end-point.
> 
> I have been blown away with how awesome and friendly this fandom is, by the way! Thanks so much to everyone who commented or encouraged me. 
> 
> Also, note small rating change.

The door opens.

He doesn’t move.  He knows what it means.  They want to take him out, to the druids, to the ring.  They’ll have to drag him, this time.  His head is pounding and his throat is burning and he gave up on pride – long ago.  Too long ago.

Shiro curls tighter around himself, and waits.

-

The first time, and it’s a blur, a thing too far back in his shattered memories to fully recall.  There had been another human, a human with a name that sits at the tip of Shiro’s tongue.  They’d shared a cake on someone’s birthday.  Red streamers.  He can almost see the human’s face.  Wide, frightened eyes.

He’d stepped forward.

He remembers the taste of blood in his mouth.  He remembers running, and dodging, the feeling of it almost like freedom.  The crowd, cheering.  It’s too far back – it sounds like every other time the crowd has cheered.  It could be from his last fight, as easily as from his first.

He thinks there must have been a memory, in victory, when he’d smiled.  When he’d known that he was alive.  He thinks that, because instead there are just ragged edges, darkness.  He knows he didn’t have the prosthetic during the first fight, but it’s there in the memories anyway.  Sometimes it’s there when he thinks back to being a child, in the green, soft place that the orbital bombardments destroyed.

It took the memories.  It took them, and it brought itself, sickly aglow with quintessence. It –

He’s learned to count.  One to one hundred, then back down, in every language he knows.  The quintessence doesn’t touch them.  He cannot remember the color of his grandfather’s eyes, but kyū-jū, kyū-jū ichi, kyū-jū ni…

-

“Shiro,” says the shadow at the door.

-

“No,” he’d told them.  “No!”  He’d screamed it and he’d shouted it until the word had lost all meaning.  Some days he’d given them name, rank, and serial number.  Some days he’d begged.

The first arm – he thinks it was the first arm – had been a weapon.  Only a weapon.  Like a sword.  He’d hated it, anyway, because he hadn’t known how much worse things could get.

Most memories, here, even the ones that haven’t been drained from him – they blur together.  Another screaming crowd, another dark cell, kill or be killed, kill or be killed.  Not the first fight with the second arm.

He thinks she left him that one on purpose.  Dug around it in his brain, propped it up, reinforced it.

_This is what you are._

His opponent had been agile, long-limbed, something like a bipedal poison dart frog with a mouth of grinning sharp teeth and spines behind each wrist.  He’d spun Shiro around, leaping from wall to wall of the arena, leaving a gash on his thigh that had festered and scarred.

For all that, it hadn’t been a very difficult fight.  Shiro’d had size and weight on his side for once.  He’d sidestepped the alien, wearing him down, ignoring the sounds of a crowd grown restless.  The loudest cheer had been when he’d taken the leg wound.

His opponent had leapt.  He’d dodged another swipe, and struck out with his uninjured leg, sending the other gladiator to the ground.  He’d pounced, hard, bringing all his weight to bear.  And he’d activated his arm for the killing blow.

Dust on his skin.  Massive, staring golden eyes, mottled skin, every jagged fang as his opponent screeched – a word.  A name.  A prayer.  The moist air of it.  His arm descending, the pain in his shoulder, the sick first give as he hit flesh, as he hit bone –

Golden light, racing up his arm.  Blinding him.  The pain.  The scream, from his throat, from the dying man beneath him.  The smell in the air, like ozone, like a thunderstorm –

And then he’d opened his eyes.  There hadn’t been a corpse beneath him.  Just dust.

Just dust, and the crowd gone silent.

-

“Shiro!”

-

The shadow lunges for him.

He reacts on instinct, shoving it away, trying to pin it to the ground – small, for a Galra.  Very small for a Galra guard.  _Druid,_ supplies a dark, twitching part of his mind, but another heard something in the shape of its voice, something in the sound of its breaths, the edge of its face –

Something, in how it doesn’t fight him, how it presses into the touch of his hand on its cheek, breaths ragged, eyes gleaming in the dark.  Something impossible.

“ _Keith?”_ The sound of his own voice is startling.  His throat is ragged and dry.  Painful.  The shadow has a dead man’s face, warm between his hands.  “Keith.”

He hasn’t dreamed in – too long.  Since the last fight, the one after the druids drained him nearly dry.  Even the nightmares have left him.  He hasn’t dreamed up a rescue since before he lost his arm.  He doesn’t know what this is.

But he clings to Keith, feels him warm, tucked against his chest, and doesn’t care.  Maybe its hallucinogens.  Maybe he’s dying.  Whatever it is, he’ll hold onto it a little longer.

-

He holds onto it, he estimates, for perhaps thirty seconds.  Then a large, rocky head peers into his cell.

“Hey,” it says.  “Is this the one you were looking for?”

Shiro and Keith flinch simultaneously, knees knocking together awkwardly as they both try to jump to their feet.  Shiro thinks he might have been able to manage it if he’d been willing to let _go,_ but he lets go and whatever this is disappears.

_Whatever this is._

The pain in his knee.  Keith, who in the light, doesn’t quite look like Keith – not the boy in his fractured memories.  Older, with a set to his jaw and a strange cast to his eyes.  The way he might have looked if he really had survived.

If this were real.

“Yeah,” says Keith, and it takes Shiro a minute to realize he’s answering the figure at the door.  “It is.”

The rocky alien – Shiro thinks, vaguely, that he might be another gladiator – nods.  “There’s more guards coming.  I’m gonna go kill some.  You might want to run if you’re gonna get back to your ship.”

“…Right,” says Keith.  He waits a moment, and they listen to the heavy footsteps disappear.  “My ship.”  He grins, and that _is_ the same – Keith’s real smile, the smile he’d worn when –

“We raced bikes together,” says Shiro.  The words stumble over each other in sudden excitement.  “In the desert.”  He can see it.  He can _smell_ it.  His head throbs.  It’s bright and heady and mad.  The air tastes like engine exhaust.  He can feel every scar on his body, but suddenly, suddenly, he’s never felt better in his life.  “I _remember.”_

Keith helps him to his feet, slower this time.  “Shiro –“

“This is going to be _really_ embarrassing if we’re just evening TV for the druids in my head,” Shiro tells him.  “But I think you might be real.”

-

He follows Keith out to wherever he’s parked his ship.  There are a few guards, but Shiro only takes out one of them, breaking his neck with a swing of the prosthetic.  It doesn’t power on, but he still jerks away from the body out of instinct.  He thinks Keith must see it, even though he was preoccupied with two robots at the time, because for the rest of the short walk he takes out anything even remotely suspicious – patrols, cameras, once a broken door – before Shiro can get close.  He’s gotten even better at throwing his knife.

At least, what Shiro _thinks_ is the same knife.  Part of it’s glowing, and he swears once it changes shape.

Keith’s ship is equally confusing.  Shiro had been expecting a stolen fighter, to the extent that he’d been expecting anything.  A massive, red, quadrupedal robot, lodged midway through a bulkhead and surrounded by an unfamiliar forcefield, manages to throw him for a bit of a loop even _after_ the events of the last half-hour.

“Here we are,” says Keith, with a sharp-edged smile.  The light from the forcefield does something strange to his eyes.  Shiro can’t tear his own away.  “I should warn you, I’ve only been –“

Something shrieks.

Shiro flinches, trying to push himself in front of Keith, before the sparks in his eyes clear and he sees the little crowd of prisoners pressed up between the forcefield and the far bulkhead.  None of them are even gladiators – just a motley collection of six or seven aliens, ragged and afraid.  The kind the Galra send into the arena just to die.  He’s killed dozens like them.

He’s been one, once.

“Shiro!”  Keith’s blade is out, but he pushes at Shiro’s chest, steering him away.  He holds out his other hand towards the prisoners, and Shiro can see the moment when he remembers it’s still gripping a knife.  His fingers waggle around the hilt awkwardly.  “Everyone, calm down!”

“It’s the Champion!”  A short alien with ragged green feathers pushes himself to the head of the crowd.

Keith presses his free hand against the forcefield, and it vanishes.  “Look.  Everyone just get into the lion–”

“He’ll kill you!  He’ll kill us all!”

Keith’s shoulders move in a long breath, and for a moment Shiro is shot back to the Garrison – walls and rocks and seemingly endless sky – sitting on the roof and showing him calming exercises.  Biofeedback.  He’s in a hospital and they’re trying to teach him to breathe through the pain –

“This is Shiro,” says Keith, shocking him back to reality.  “He’s not going to kill anyone.”

Green Feathers bobs his head.  “We’re not going with him!”  Behind him, the rest of the prisoners murmur, but no one disagrees.

Shiro can’t blame them.

If they were thrown into the ring together, yesterday, he would have killed them.  It would have been terrible and it would have been wrong and he would have told himself, like he told himself every time, that it was better him.  Better he be the Champion than slit his own throat because at least he made it quick.  At least he didn’t like it.  At least –

“Then you can stay here,” says Keith.

“No,” says Shiro.  The words drag their up into his throat, from the man he’d been once.  The good man. “No.  Keith, if it’s them or me, you need to leave me.  You –“

Keith grabs his arm.  “No.”  His hand squeezes, warm through Shiro’s tunic.  “I’m leaving.  You’re coming with me.”  He turns back to the crowd before Shiro can protest.  “The rest of you can make your choice.”

The ship picks that moment to rumble underneath them.

_“Warning.  Drive core failure imminent.”_

The crowd bolts for the lion’s open jaws.

-

Shiro sits in the cockpit, or rather stands, leaning against the back of Keith’s chair and staring out through the viewscreens.  The rest of the rescuees have located a small cargo bay back behind, in the body of the lion – the Red Lion, Keith had called her, with unrestrained excitement – and have more or less barricaded themselves inside.  At least they’re aboard.

Shiro knows Keith was bluffing – Keith had to have been bluffing – but he’s still relieved it hadn’t come down to the wire.

Green Feathers seems to have been demoted from his job as spokesman; it’s been taken over by Aiaia, who introduces herself with a hesitant press of tentacles before scrambling out of the cockpit and away.

Shiro can’t see Keith’s face.  But he can see echoes of Keith’s sharp grin in the grip of his hands on the controls, in the way he leans forward as though the lion-ship is his old hoverbike, ready to follow Shiro off a cliff.  He can taste the desert air for a moment before it fades, and it’s just him and Keith, launching themselves out at the stars.

They’d had plans for this.  Keith had had plans, at any rate.  Shiro had had dreams.  If he could still fly at thirty, maybe – but he knew they’d never put him in command.  Guilt churns in his stomach as another memory flashes by, too sharp to catch, just the impression of a young Keith and trembling eyes beneath knotted brows.

But he’s flying now.

Space stretches out before them.  Space, and stars, and a Galra fleet.  The ship rocks with the impact as a wing of fighters begin their run.

Keith laughs, short and low.  “Hey, Old-Timer.  Watch this.”

They spring forwards, leaving the fighters behind them in an instant.  A cruiser looms up ahead of them, and the lion sprints along its port side, claws leaving gashes behind them.

“You can –“ 

Shiro starts, but Keith isn’t talking to him. 

“Alright, then,” and now Shiro can hear that smile, clear in his voice, “jawblade out.”

They tear through the cruiser’s engines, and then zoom towards another, taking time on the way to fire at another wing of fighters – or possibly the same wing, Galra don’t seem to go much into nose art on their ships – from a gun Shiro can’t see.

It’s magnificent.

They field three complaints from the cargo bay, Aiaia’s apologetic voice requesting first food, and then less spinning, and then perhaps something to clean up the vomit, if you would be so kind?

They take down three destroyers, a cruiser, and more fighters than Shiro can count.  And the way they move – Kerberos – _no no no_ – his last flight, had taken months.  Keith’s Lion darts from planet to planet, dodges and turns and handles like a dream, though occasionally Keith swears at it under his breath.

“Up there,” Keith says, pointing.  “The second planet.  Those ships –“

“Druids.”  Shiro tightens the grip of his flesh hand on the back of Keith’s chair.

Keith hisses in a breath.  “I need to know what they’re up to.”

Shiro nods, sharply, then forces himself to speak.  “Be careful.”

Keith cranes around and looks at him.  Shiro tries to project an air of calm and nonchalance.  A joke might help, but his mouth is dry and his brain is roiling.  Maybe tactics instead? “Don’t let the rest of the fleet block you in.”

“I’d like to see them try.”  Keith reaches up and squeezes Shiro’s wrist.  “Help me out with the sensors, will you?  I still can’t even get them to Galran, let alone English.”

Shiro snorts.  “And what am I supposed to do about that, exactly?”

“…Just make sure they don’t flash red.  Or maybe green.”

“Next rescue mission, you might want to go after an engineer.” 

He watches the screens, all the same.   It’s pretty clear what most of them are trying to say – here’s a planet, here’s an enemy ship, here’s an unusually active asteroid belt.  He does wish, as unfamiliar text spirals up from the image of the druid-infested planet, that they had the Garrison’s linguistics professor on board – Dr. Arriman, who had left English, Spanish, and Chinese to her assistants and instead had given lectures on alien signals, the history of decoding, and her own work with Linear A and the Indus Valley Script.

He can’t remember her face, but the rest of it – it doesn’t hurt.  It doesn’t send that now-familiar stabbing pain into his head.

Shiro smiles.  And then the screen showing the planet begins pulsing, red to yellow to purple, faster and faster.  “Keith!”

“I see it.”

He’s not looking at Shiro.  He’s looking out the viewscreen.

At the planet.

Light encircles its northern pole.  Light, that leaves darkness in its wake.  It creeps southwards, further and further, reaching the equator as they watch.  The ice is gone.  The seas are gone.  The land is barren rock.  Shiro can taste druid magic behind his teeth, and his knees buckle as pain shoots up from his Galra arm.

“Shiro!”

“We need to get out of here,” Shiro rasps.  “Keith!  We need to –“

Keith spins the Lion, and they’re off.  Accelerating, accelerating, smashing through a small Galra craft rather than even bothering with the gun.  The lion climbs vertically out of the solar system, but now Shiro can see Keith wrestling with the controls.

A roar shakes the cockpit.

Ahead of them, suddenly, is a spiraling mass of pale light.  A wormhole?  Shiro racks his brain, but there’s no time to put a name to it before they’re through.

-

The Lion touches down gently.  Shiro slides down from its open jaws, staring around at a forest of white columns underneath an unfamiliar sky.

An alien world.  An exploratory vessel.  Keith at his shoulder.  It feels _right_ , as warm as the sun on his face.

“Home,” mutters Keith.  “It’s come home.” 

“Does it… talk to you?”  The Lion is clearly more than just a ship, but otherwise Shiro is lost.

“Sort of.  Images, mostly.”  Keith scowls, but there’s a lightness to it.  “I’m hoping the Blade will know more.”

 _The Blade._ That stirs up a swarm of questions.  Keith has an armored mask, a black jumpsuit, and a suddenly-glowing knife.  Keith is free.  Keith is alive. 

“Is Earth really gone?”

Keith freezes.  Shiro, on instinct, lays a hand on his shoulder.  Tries to look him in the eyes, but Keith stares at the ground.

“It is.”

Shiro buckles, and now Keith grabs at _his_ arm.

“I’m sorry,” he starts.  “I just… You’re alive.  I hoped they were lying.”  Memories spiral up in his head, faces without names, names without faces, _Colleen, Katie, Adam…_

“Shiro – ”

“Footprints.”  Two, in the dust of the courtyard’s stone floor.  Human-sized, probably booted.  Recent, surely – he can hear the sea breeze against the walls.  He watches Keith’s shoulders tense as his gaze locks onto them.  It’s easier than thinking about Earth.  Anything, right now, is easier than thinking about Earth.

There’s a door at the other end of the courtyard.  It slides open as they cautiously approach.

The interior of the white castle is alien and beautiful, even in the dim light, with long sweeping lines and high walls.  Occasionally they pass more signs that they are not alone – a handprint, a half-dusted wall – but the halls are silent.

He’s not afraid.  Nothing in this place looks Galra, nothing in this place even seems to be hostile, and it would take a lot more than a haunted castle to scare him now.  All the same, he and Keith find themselves walking closer and closer together, their steps slowing and falling into sync.

Sloping stairs take them into a wide, oval room.  Shiro steps forward, and lights blink on in front of him, blindingly white.

“Scanning,” announces a soft, accented voice.  “Please remain still.”

The white light touches him, and his heart jumps into his throat. He scrabbles with his flesh hand for something to ground him, and then he feels Keith’s hand, tight around his wrist.  Shiro tries to flash him a reassuring smile, but as the light reaches his prosthetic, he can only bite down on a grimace.  Pain lances up through his shoulder.

“Scanning,” the voice repeats.  Shiro squints over to see Keith wincing uncomfortably as the light covers him.  He slides his flesh hand up in Keith’s grip until he can give a reassuring squeeze of his own.

“Intruder detected.”

“What?”  Shiro whips his head around.  Unless _they’re_ the intruders, in which case this is the slowest security system he’s ever seen.

“Galra presence detected.”

_My arm._

Keith swears, and then jerks Shiro back as turrets lower from the ceiling.

“We’re not Galra!”  Shiro fights for breath.  “Please, we can explain –“

“Run!”

They sprint, diving for what cover the stair rails offer, still pulling each other along.  Keith takes out two more turrets with a throw of his knife, unmistakably a sword again when it returns to his hand.  Shiro blocks shots with his prosthetic the best he can – he still takes a stinging blow to one leg.  Keith, with his armor, is in better shape, but the two of them still barely manage to dash out of the castle and into the Lion, turrets firing in their wake.  As they take to the skies, Shiro sees a glimmering barrier rise up around the ruin.

What’s left of their wormhole doesn’t look particularly stable, but Keith slams the Lion through it, hands white knuckled on the controls as the ship shudders.  They fall out of the wormhole in more or less empty space, with a few larger points of light that could be nearby systems.

“I’m sorry,” says Shiro.

Keith looks up at him, head tilted.  “What?”

Shiro tries for a smile.  “My arm.  Guess they thought it made me Galra.”  There’s a black pit in his belly at the thought.

“No.”  Keith looks at him, jaw set.  “It was me.”

“What?”

“It was me,” Keith repeats.  His eyes are defiant, frightened, achingly familiar.  “…That’s how I got off Earth, Shiro.  My mother came for me.”

Shiro blinks.  The silence holds just a second too long.  Something shutters behind Keith’s eyes, and he starts to turn away.  Shiro’s chest thumps in panic, and he fights for words.

“Good,” he says, and immediately regrets it.  “I mean, good.”  He’s quite aware that he’s babbling like an idiot, but every word out of his mouth has Keith turning back towards him, and that’s what matters.  He can try to wrap his head around what Keith’s actually saying once the adrenaline recedes.  “I’m glad you’re alive.”

Alive and… Galra.  Part-Galra?  Alive and part-Galra and telepathically bonded to a robot lion.  Shiro feels the corners of his mouth quirking up into a smile, and then an unfamiliar, throat-cracking laugh.  “I’m glad we’re both alive.”

Keith boggles at him.

“Excuse me.”  Shiro and Keith both jump as Green Feathers pops his head into the cockpit.  “Will someone please tell me what the _quiznak_ is going on?”

-

They drop the prisoners off at a space station Keith terms “probably safe;” at the very least, even Aiaia seems to find it preferable to staying in the Lion with Shiro.  As they plot a course away, Keith fills him in on the past year: his mother, Matt Holt, the Blade of Marmora.

It will take them two days to reach Keith’s home base, and another eighteen hours after that until safe passage to it opens up.  He apologizes about the ration bars they’ll have to eat, and Shiro laughs again. 

“I haven’t had food with flavor since Earth.”  He takes another dry bite.  “I think it might be a myth.”

Keith snorts.  “You’re in luck.  I still have some of Mara’s spiced arachnids back at the base – you’ll never want flavor again.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” Shiro tells him.  It’s the first time Keith’s actually smiled talking about the Blade.

They sleep in cycles, a few hours at a time, one of them always on watch.  It’s easier that way; neither of them has to wake up alone.  The cockpit is cramped, but leaning up against Keith, shoulders wrapped in a gold-trimmed blanket from the cargo hold, feels like luxury.

_This is real._

The rest of the time, they talk.

Keith is warm against his side, a long line of pressure.  He doesn’t think they used to touch this much, but right now he’s grateful for it.  _Touch-starved._ Maybe they both are.

Shiro takes a short swig of water.  They’d made an attempt at ration-bar oatmeal before realizing that the closest thing they had to a spoon was Keith’s luxite blade.

“I know there’s a Blue Lion – we have footage of it leaving Earth.”  Keith snorts.  “And it was singing in my head back out in the desert.”  His face flinches slightly, and he slaps a hand down on the abandoned pilot’s seat.  “Stop that.”

“Red has a jealous streak?”

That gets a laugh out of Keith.  “A bit.” 

“You were out in the desert a long time.”  He tries for a question, but it doesn’t come out as one.  There are too many gaps in his memories.  Keith was at the Garrison.  Keith was hearing voices in the desert.  If he puts a map to that, maybe he can put a map to himself.

“…Yeah.”  The comforting weight of Keith’s head on his shoulder vanishes.  “It was after you were taken.  They told me – they said it was pilot error.  They wouldn’t listen!  Even my _mom_ made more sense than—” 

He cuts off, pulling himself away.  Shiro rises to his knees, trying to follow, meeting Keith’s eyes, meeting his small, bitter grin. 

“I punched Iverson in the face.”

Agony stabs into Shiro’s skull.

The arena.  Gray walls all around.  Prisoners, a dozen of them, soft and human and barely armed.  He’d gone inside of himself, wall after wall after wall –

 _“Use it!”_ Pain pain pain, _I won’t –_

Lowering each body to the ground.  Something hot and stinging in his eyes, but he hadn’t needed to see.  He was a weapon now.  A weapon, this little bit of kindness the only rebellion he could offer.  A woman, gray hair, green eyes.  Folding her arms across her chest, rising to meet the next death.

A man.  A scarred eye.  Old, but he’d known how to fight.  His mouth had been moving.  He’d been saying something, a name, a title.  Not screaming, not begging.  Just saying it.

Dodging the next blow.  His arm, rising up, golden pain shooting up his neck –

“Shiro!”

That wasn’t right.  That wasn’t the right voice –

“Shiro!”

Keith.

Keith shakes him roughly by the shoulders.  Shiro can feel his breath on his face, see his eyes, close and desperate.

_This is real._

“Keith,” he manages.

“What just happened?”  Keith’s hands don’t leave his shoulders.  “You collapsed.  I thought –“

“I killed Iverson,” says Shiro.  His breath comes in deep, harsh pants.  “Keith, I –“

Another ragged gasp.  His head throbs.

“I remember.”

_-_

The Lion hangs in empty space.  Shiro leans back against Keith, who had pried his fingers away from his forehead and then replaced them with his own, moving in small, soothing circles. 

“How much do you remember?”

Shiro clenches his human fist, nails biting into the skin.  “Bits and pieces.  The fights.  A few names, a few faces – you.”  He takes in a breath.  “You said Matt Holt’s name, and I remembered –“ he tries to smile, even knowing Keith can’t see it.  “That pizza we got for you?  And trying to sing happy birthday?”  He pauses, tries to pull together the words.  “It comes in flashes.  After that, there’s one of the flight to Kerberos.  If I had to guess, most of it’s still in there, just… buried.”

Keith is silent for a moment.  “But it’s coming back?”

“Yeah,” says Shiro, willing himself to believe it.  Willing _Keith_ to believe it.  “I think so.”

They talk a bit more about the Garrison, about Matt, trading stories, _laughing._ Shiro tries to bring up Iverson, once more, and Keith snarls.

“You didn’t have a choice.”

“…There’s always a choice.”  He could have died.  The prisoners would have died anyway – but that was what he told himself in the arena, to survive, the mantra still burned into what’s left of his mind.  It’s not an excuse. 

“No,” says Keith.  He spins Shiro around, stares into his eyes.  “No.  Remember what you told me?  _I’m glad you’re alive.”_

“…I was hoping we could forget that conversation.”

Keith doesn’t even grin.  “I’ve killed people too, Shiro.  I’ve put…  I put finding you ahead of anything.  I lied to Keshin, and now he’s dead.  I…”  He stumbles, breath raw and ragged. 

Shiro leans forward, before he can stop himself, pressing their foreheads together, a hand on the back of Keith’s neck.  His vertebrae stick out even through his armor.

“We’re going to live, Shiro.  We’re going to.”

-

“Identify yourself.”

Keith spits out a string of unfamiliar syllables.

Shiro, behind his shoulder, stares in awe.  Twisting, weaving bands of light.  To build something, here, amid black holes and the death throes of stars – he’s seen the Galra Empire from the bottom, seen Emperor Zarkon himself, once (twice – three times – the memories are splintered and painful, and he shies away), but this is something else.  _This_ is millennia of space travel, millennia of engineering.

“…Confirm your identification.”

Keith growls out another string of syllables, and then a chain of numbers.

“Where is your partner?”

Keith closes his eyes, then pulls a knife Shiro hadn’t noticed before from once of the pouches behind his belt.  “Keshin died in the line of duty.”

_Oh, no._

“And –“

“The Red Lion was the only viable escape vehicle.”  Shiro can hear Keith’s teeth grinding.  He hesitantly lifts a hand to rest it on Keith’s shoulder.  Some of the tension softens.  “I figured it would be an asset.”

“That remains to be seen.”  A short pause.  Shiro’s chest fills with ice.  “You are cleared for entry, agent.”

-

Tension stays coiled in the pit of Shiro’s stomach.  He couldn’t help but notice that neither Keith nor the Blade had mentioned _him._

If anything could calm him, though, it would be now, watching Keith fly.

The Lion twirls and twists around bands of light, flying debris, every obstacle in its path.  Keith has always been an incredible pilot, but this is transcendent.  He feels a rough laugh bubbling up in his throat, and then Keith turns to him and grins.

They pick up speed.

A dark mass – the base – looms up at them, but Keith doesn’t slow.  They circle it once, so close at times they nearly scrape against the sides, and then shoot off again, rolling and looping and finally coming in for a landing.  What on their first approach had been an empty span of rough gray is now bristling with tall warriors in armor like Keith’s.  A few in the back are cheering.

The one in front, however, screams _unhappy commanding officer_ even at a distance and through a mask.

“Is that Kolivan?”

“Looks like it.”  Keith looks down, towards the knife he’s still holding.  _Keshin,_ thinks Shiro, and wonders who he was.  What he meant to Keith, what he might have meant to the Blades slowly approaching the Red Lion.

Keith holds Keshin’s knife in one hand as they clamber out of the Lion. His other hand is tight in Shiro’s.

He expects to hear whispers, muttering, the sounds that have followed him since Kerberos and longer.  Instead, the Blades still.  All sound chokes off except for the crunch of Keith’s boots and the pounding of Shiro’s heart in his ears.

“What is this?”

There are blades drawn in the crowd, more from one eyeblink to the next, their wielders not even seeming to move.  Shiro senses more than sees Keith’s far hand flinching down towards his belt.

Shiro raises his chin, parade ground rest except for his fingers still squeezing tight around Keith’s.  “My name is Takashi Shirogane, of Earth.”  He stares levelly into Kolivan’s mask.  _An ally.  An ally.  Just another Galra._ “I was the Champion.”  It tastes like ash on his tongue, but his name didn’t taste much better.

“I know who you are.”  Kolivan turns, very slightly, towards Keith, an obvious attempt to wall Shiro off from the discussion.  “Is Sendak dead?”

Keith takes in a long breath.  “Depends on which ship he was on, sir.  We took down two cruiser-class vessels, four destroyer-class, at least fourteen fighters, and did significant damage to several more.”

“With the Red Lion.”

“Yes.”

Now the murmurs slowly begin to rise again.  Shiro feels a surge of pride.  _A classroom trip, simulator scores, a fistfight._ Everyone had always doubted Keith, and always, he proved them wrong.  He’s small, he doesn’t look Galra – Shiro remembers enough of the arena, of which Galra were soldiers and which Galra were slaves, to know, even without Kolivan staring them down, that the Blade has doubted Keith as well.

Keith’s voice cuts through Shiro’s thoughts.  “Sir,” he says, and then words that sound Galran but not quite, a few of them just on the edge of comprehensible.  An older dialect, at Shiro’s guess.  Something ceremonial.

His guess is confirmed as Keith holds out Keshin’s knife, flat in his palm.

Kolivan is still.  A Blade massive even for a Galra steps forward from behind him, and echoes Keith’s words, reaching for the knife.

 

“We will discuss this in your debriefing,” says Kolivan.  “Keith, with me.”  He gives a short, sharp gesture.  “Take… Takashi Shirogane to Bukog.  I want to know what the druids have done to him.”

-

“I’m sorry,” says Shiro, smoke rising from the pallet beneath him.  “I’m so sorry.  We can try again –“

“No,” says Bukog.  “No, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

He’d told Keith he was going to be fine.  He’d squeezed Keith’s hand, and let go, and told Keith he was going to be fine.  Told himself, with every step, as the rock and metal walls loomed in around him, Galra soldiers – Galra _Blades,_ Galra _Blades_ – hemming him in. 

And then a Galra doctor had stuck a needle in his good arm, and that had been it for _fine._

Bukog had dodged, thankfully, but he and Shiro are now more or less pressed to opposite ends of the small infirmary.  Shiro peels his druid hand off of the pallet, smoke acrid and sharp in his nose.

“I don’t care,” says Bukog, and Shiro starts, until he realizes the doctor isn’t talking to him.  “Bring Keith down, _now._ ”  He lifts a lavender-clawed hand from what must be a communicator.

_No, no, no._

“I can –“ Shiro starts.

Bukog points a claw in his direction.  “No.  I don’t know what Kolivan was thinking, sending you down here alone – look.  Kit.  I’ve been dealing with traumatized warriors for decaphoebs, and I don’t particularly feel like getting any more notches in my ears.”  He shakes his head in emphasis.  “ _Druids._ ”  It trails off into muttering.  Shiro catches Kolivan’s name a few times.

He doesn’t want Keith to see him like this.

He’s spent the last two days being weak in front of Keith – stumbling, _fainting,_ waking up from a nightmare pressed against his shoulder.  But now he’s free, now he’s _safe_. 

He needs to be someone Keith can depend on.  He needs, at the very least, to be capable of sitting through a doctor’s appointment on his own.  It’s not as though he hasn’t had practice.  Pity in Bukog’s yellow eyes is grating.  Pity in Keith’s –

He doesn’t know how to deal with that.

He’s still staring down at the hated metal of his druid hand, waiting for an answer to appear, when Keith storms into the room.

“What happened?”  Keith’s eyes flicker wildly between Shiro and Bukog.  “What did you do to him?”

“Keith!”  Shiro tries for calm.  He catches sight of Kolivan, massive in the doorframe, and squares his shoulders instinctively.  “Keith, I’m _fine.”_

Keith’s eyes meet his, wild.  “I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry, I should’ve known –“

Shiro reaches out a hand to catch Keith’s flailing arm.  “It’s my fault.”  The words come up bitter in his mouth.

Bukog catches Keith’s other hand, and shoves a few unfamiliar medical devices at him.  “Take these.  Do exactly what I say.”  He rounds on Kolivan.  “And you –“

It doesn’t get much better.  Shiro tries to handle as much of the checkup himself as possible, but only the syringes can really be used onehanded, and every time he moves his druid arm everyone in the room but Keith visibly flinches.  Keith, meanwhile, is still actively being debriefed, and _Shiro_ flinches every time Kolivan raises his voice.

Not fear.  Guilt.  Everything Keith did, everything he sacrificed – it was for him.  For a mass murderer who can’t even get his pulse checked without attacking the doctor.  He jabs the next needle in with more force than necessary.

“Altean,” says Kolivan.

Bukog, who up until this point has shown no interest in the debriefing, makes a low sound in his throat.

“That sounds familiar,” says Shiro, and then checks himself.  “…But I don’t know why.”  Something, buried in the black morass of his memories.  Golden light and hooded yellow eyes –

“Voltron was predominantly Altean-built,” says Kolivan.

“It was trying to go home.”  Keith’s voice is quiet, but certain.

“Perhaps.  You said the building was occupied?”

The debriefing loses what military cohesion it had possessed, Shiro and Keith trading off as they tell the story, Kolivan growing more and more pensive, even Bukog occasionally making a growled contribution. 

“If the Red Lion had a homing protocol, the Blue Lion likely did as well.”  Kolivan strokes his chin, then turns to Keith.  “Blade.”  A single quirk of his lips.  “ _Paladin._ I want a copy of the Red Lion’s navigational records.”

“Yes, sir.”  There’s no waver in Keith’s voice, though how they’re going to go about getting navigational records out of the Lion is a mystery to Shiro.

Kolivan leaves, but Bukog all but blocks the door when Shiro and Keith move to follow.  They sit in silence, watching lights appear and dim on the medical station while Bukog swears at it under his breath.  Finally, he rounds on Shiro.

“Quintessence healing,” he says, as though the words are rancid in his mouth.  “Quintessence healing, on a species not evolved for it.  _Druids._ ”  He flips the lid off of what Shiro hopes is a flask and not a test tube, and drains it.  “I don’t care what Kolivan says this time, I want Ulaz back and I want him back now.”

Shiro tries to digest this.  “And what does that mean for me?”

“That _thing_ the druids grafted to you.  It drains quintessence, then forces it through your system.”

Dust.  Dust on an arena floor.  Wide eyes and the pain the pain the pain –

Keith’s hand on his chest steadies him.

“As for your prognosis,” Bukog continues, “stars only know. You could be fine, you could develop an uncontrollable hunger for living flesh.  You could be immortal.” 

Shiro trades an uneasy glance with Keith.

“Immort –“

“Living flesh –“

Bukog waves them off.  “ _That_ is why I want Ulaz.”  He stabs a finger at Keith.  “Tell that to Kolivan.  He had a soft spot for you to begin with, and you’re the _Red Paladin_ now.”

Keith snorts.  Shiro stares off towards the wall, mind racing.  _Quintessence healing._

“I want a full report,” he tells Bukog, sharply.  There’s a thing in the back of his throat.  He can’t tell if it’s fear or hope.

-

They end up in Keith’s quarters, munching on slightly fresher rations than they’d gotten in the Lion.  Shiro isn’t up to facing anything else here tonight.

The report isn’t that helpful.  The deterioration is somewhere between slowed and stopped, which ought to feel like a miracle.  As it is…

“They’ve taken away one way to kill me, and added two or three more.”  He tries for a laugh.  “If I turn into a space vampire, promise to stake me.”

Keith glares at him.  “That’s not going to happen.”

Shiro leans his head back against the wall.  Keith’s quarters are decently sized – small for a Galra, maybe, but roomy enough for the two of them.  The lighting is gentle.  The walls are gray, but a different gray, at least, from his cell. 

But there’s not a window.

He doesn’t know where the Blade is going to put him, if they’re going to put him anywhere.  But he knows what he’ll see, first thing tomorrow, if he wakes up alone.

Four gray walls.

He clenches his fists.  His shoulder throbs.  “…Can I stay here for the night?”

There’s only one bed, but there wasn’t much more room in the Lion’s cockpit.

Keith is silent only a moment.  “Yeah.  Sure.”

“I’m sorry –“ Shiro starts.

Keith holds up a hand.  “Don’t. …It’s not exactly a hardship.  Having you here.”  There’s a slight red tint to his cheeks. 

They clamber into the bunk not long after that, Shiro with his back to the wall, Keith in front of him.  Only one bunk is less of a problem than only one pillow; he winds up with his nose almost buried in Keith’s hair.  The mattress is thin, military-grade foam, recognizable even on an alien base.  It’s still the first soft surface Shiro has slept on in longer than he can remember.

“…You shouldn’t have had to see me like that.”

“Like what?”  Keith props himself up on one elbow, turning to face Shiro.  His eyes gleam in the dim light.

“Earlier.  When I interrupted your briefing.  I’m sorry.”  He tries to hold Keith’s gaze.  He owes him that much.

“No.”  Keith frowns.  “I’m the one who sent you off to a _Galra medic,_ alone.  I should have thought –“

“And I should have been able to handle it.”  Shiro grinds his teeth.

“You don’t lose that kind of trauma in three days.”

“Trauma –“  Shiro takes a deep breath.  “Keith, I nearly killed him.  That’s not – ”

“Half the base has taken a swing at Bukog.”

“Not with druid tech.”  Shiro shuts his eyes.  “Not with – I should have been able to handle it.” 

The sound of Keith’s breathing stills for a second.  “Shiro.  Look at me.  Let me ask you one thing.  How  - fuck.  How would you treat anybody else dealing with trauma?  With PTSD?”

 _I nearly killed him,_ Shiro wants to say again.  But Keith forges on.

“How’d you treat _me,_ every time I got into a fight or stole your car?  Because – if you can’t remember, let me tell you.  You told me you’d never give up on me.  You told me not to give up on myself.  You were patient, and kind, and just – _good_.”  Keith’s face is inches from Shiro’s, something desperate in the gleam of his eyes.  “Just.”  He swallows.  “Spare some of that kindness for yourself.”

-

He wakes with a warm weight plastered against his front.

_Keith.  It’s only Keith._

Keith, solid and breathing, who starts and twitches slightly when Shiro does before pressing his face back into his shoulder with a little grumble.  Shiro, hesitantly, stokes his back, soothing.

It feels right.  It feels right in a way that nothing has for a long time.  He isn’t going to question it.  He isn’t going to press it – Keith’s blush last night, Keith’s closeness now, the strength in Keith’s arms and sharp angle of his jawline.

He’s beautiful.  He’s grown into a man while Shiro’s grown into a monster, and –

And.

_Spare some of that kindness for yourself._

It’s not that easy.  It’s not that simple.

But he’ll try.

Eventually they pull themselves out of bed.  Shiro’d half expected to be awoken by blaring alarms, or at least some sign that the Blade operates on a military schedule, but maybe Kolivan figures they deserve a day off.  Keith leads him to the dining hall, and Shiro squares his shoulders and follows him in.

Keith greets a few Galra – Mara, Thace, Bethir – who raise awkward hands at Shiro, or, in one case, simply glare.  Shiro tries to figure out how to work the food dispensors, feeling a gleam of triumph that one finally glops a mass of …oatmeal?  Green oatmeal? – of food, at any rate, into his bowl seconds before Keith reaches him.

It tastes vaguely of dill, but… flavor.  He’ll take it.  They cram themselves into one side of a corner table, shoulder to shoulder, hitting Shiro with a memory of Matt Holt laughing in a rundown diner.  A bare sting of pain behind his eyes.

But that’s all. He doesn’t faint.

They spend the rest of the day wandering the base, Keith playing tour guide.  They spend a pleasant hour or so in the sparring ring – Shiro had been nervous, at first, about how he would handle fighting someone again.  If he hurt Keith – _dust, dust on the arena floor –_

Keith springs up, laughing, and they start again, and again, until they’re no longer keeping score.

“Just wait,” Keith says, as they towel off.  “The best is yet to come.”

Shiro laughs – really laughs, pumped on adrenaline, pumped on something like joy.  “I don’t know.  This is going to be pretty hard to top.”  He grins.  “I’m still ahead on points, by the way.”

Keith shoves his shoulder.  “Just follow me.”

-

Keith leads him through what turn from corridors into tunnels, hewn into bare rock.  Their footsteps echo as they walk.

He can see Keith growing more and more excited – or more and more nervous – until finally he grabs Shiro’s hand and pulls him the rest of the way, towards a massive double door that rattles open with a touch of Keith’s palm to the keypad.

 _Ancient tech._ He wonders if he’ll ever stop being enthralled by the idea of ancient tech – by a ten thousand year old castle that sent laser drones after intruders, by this base, held stationary by forces millenia beyond Earth science and still old enough to have forgotten corners.

Keith tugs him through, and Shiro stops thinking.

Stars _._   He can see the stars.

The beams and currents of light he saw on the way in dance across the viewscreen, but beyond them strange constellations gleam.  The milky band of a galaxy’s arm arcs across the top, and Shiro peers, trying to follow it.

He doesn’t know how much time passes.  He could spend a thousand years here, trying to make up for the two he spent away from the stars.

Eventually, Keith nudges his shoulder.  “…That’s Earth,” he says, quietly.  “Or, well, the Milky Way at least.”  He points to a distant dot of light.

Shiro takes in a long breath.  _Earth.  Kerberos.  Proxima Centauri._ Everything he’d known, everything he’d lost – all in that spark of light.  

_Earth, from space, the first time, his commander’s hand on his shoulder, a barked laugh from –_

He stumbles.  He stumbles, but Keith catches him, hands on his arms, eyes boring into his own and gleaming with starlight.

Shiro kisses him.

Shiro kisses him, and tries to draw back, tries to apologize, but Keith’s hands are tight on his face as he kisses back with abandon. 

They draw back, finally, for breath.  Slowly, tentatively, Shiro rests his hands on Keith’s waist.  “I…”

Keith looks at him, a mad quirk to his lips, but something raw and fearful in his eyes. “If you don’t want –”

“I want to kiss you again,” says Shiro, words tripping over themselves.  “But if you – ”

Keith pulls him down into another kiss.

-

Shiro’s not really sure how they make it back to Keith’s room.  They’d spent another half-hour or so under the stars, kissing and laughing and pointing out the occasional long-range comet.

 _Make a wish,_ Keith had said.

Shiro hadn’t answered.  Had kissed him again.  This won’t solve everything – maybe it won’t solve anything.  Maybe it’s a terrible idea.  Here, away from the stars, he remembers all the reasons Keith deserves better, all the raw fear of having someone who loves you enough to kill for you, to die for you.  All the memories locked away in his head, the hooded woman and her glowing eyes.

Keith leans back on the bunk.  He’s beautiful.

The stars in his eyes.  That’s a new memory.  The comet.  Keith’s hands in his own.

And the noise Keith makes, as Shiro pressed his hands into his too-thin hipbones and swallows him down –

That’s a new memory.  That’s Shiro’s memory.

That’s one that he’s going to keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: Drama! Plotty bits! ...And probably another rating change *shifty eyes*.
> 
> I'm ElizabethLou8 on twitter, btw, and 247reader on tumblr. Feel free to come say hi!


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